Seventeen years of engineering notes. This is where it all started: SQL Server trenches, 2 AM pages, replication setups, deadlock graphs, and quick scripts shared between DBAs who were figuring it out together.
These posts are preserved as written — a working engineer’s notebook. The tools have changed. The discipline hasn’t.
2008–2012: The SQL Server trenches
Daily DBA life: backup and restore, performance tuning, replication, T-SQL scripts, PowerShell automation, interview prep. Hundreds of field notes from the era when a blog post was how the community debugged together.
- SQL Server 2005 Interview Questions — where the archive began
- Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008
- Setup Replication in MySQL
2013–2023: The quiet years
Fifteen years running data platforms at enterprise scale — thousands of databases, large migrations, production incidents at 3 AM. Not blogged. Lived. That experience later became the modernization playbooks: What Operating 17,000 Databases Taught Me About Data Architecture.
2024–now: The AI engineering era
Production AI, agentic systems, retrieval pipelines, and the data foundations they stand on. The current work lives at the Agentic AI hub — start there for the modern era.
Browse the full archive
Every legacy post, preserved: the Archive category.
Jugal Shah has been writing about data and engineering since 2008. The current work — production AI, agentic systems, enterprise data architecture — is at aideeva.com.
